As yesterday’s European election results came in, media coverage began to take on a distinct sense of dread. “A far right surge upends national politics,” blared one CNN headline. “Far right gains deal stunning defeats to France’s Macron and Germany’s Scholz,” declared PBS. A New York Times title sought to strike a relatively optimistic tone, finding solace in the fact that “In E.U. Elections, the Center Holds” — but, it noted glumly, “the Far Right Still Wreaks Havoc.”
It remains to be seen whether this most recent bout of elections will change much of anything in European politics.
Indeed, the suite of nationalist, anti-immigration parties that the media consistently insists on describing as “far right” made gains that were “even more stunning than many analysts predicted,” CBS noted. While the nationalists did not muster enough votes to wrest control of the European Union from the body’s current center-right majority, its substantial gains were yet another sign of surging popular momentum for a coalition that was regarded as fringe and marginal just a few years ago — particularly in a number of the E.U.’s most powerful and influential nations. (READ MORE from Nate Hochman: Strangers in Their Own Country)
The most remarkable story of the night, in this regard, was in France, where President Emmanuel Macron moved to dissolve his country’s National Assembly and call a snap election in the face of a shocking two-to-one loss to Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally. In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling center-left party lost to the nationalist Alternative for Germany, which overcame a series of scandals — and overwhelming opposition from the German political establishment — to make substantial gains, finishing second-place overall (and solidifying its position as the largest and most popular party in east Germany). In Italy, too, nationalists shored up their dominant position, led by “Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — whose far-right Brothers of Italy party surged to first place in the country, solidifying Meloni as a rising conservative star on the world stage,” the Washington Post reported. And in Austria, too, “the far-right Freedom Party was also forecast to finish first.”
The projected record number of seats secured by “far-right” parties represents one of the most decisive mandates yet for Europe’s right-wing populists, in a continent-wide show of political force. The E.U.’s parliamentary elections are debated in more than 24 languages, and represents a constituency of 27 countries and some 373 million potential voters — the “world’s second-biggest exercise in democracy, behind India’s recent election,” ABC reported. What’s more, voter turnout across Europe was the highest it’s been in 30 years. (And in many countries, it was much higher still — Germans turned out at a record-breaking 64.8 percent).
Many centrists and liberals across the West professed bewilderment at their ideological compatriots’ electoral trouncing. (Belgium’s liberal Prime Minister broke down in tears while announcing his resignation in the face of a crushing loss). “The re-emergence of the radical right as a political force is coming as a shock,” POLITICO’s European affiliate reported. On X, Meta’s Tom Gara mourned: “It’s very scary that in basically every Western democracy immigration politics is powering a massive far right surge and nobody on the non-far-right seems to have any idea how to deal with it.”
One suspects that most Western elites are smart enough to know exactly what they would need to do to “deal with it”; in reality, they simply don’t want to. The nationalist surge is anything but shocking, and its origins are plain and unambiguous to anyone with ears to hear and eyes to see. Immigration — at unprecedented levels, each year seemingly higher than the one before, importing millions upon millions of unassimilated, often-hostile foreign peoples from alien nations and cultures into small, once-homogenous Western nations — is the singular, defining, fundamental issue of our time, both in Europe and the West more broadly. It is the near-singular issue that every one of the ostensibly “far-right” parties rode to victory, and it is the near-singular reason that heretofore-unseen numbers of Europeans voted for them in yesterday’s election.
The people who have run Western civilization for the past three decades (if not always in formal political terms, then certainly in de facto cultural and social ones) have gone to increasingly extreme lengths to avoid doing the one thing that would stem the rising tide of nationalism. They have, in varying times and places, discarded centuries of legal norms, manipulated or outright rigged their respective nations’ electoral systems, outright banned entire political parties, jailed activists and even sitting politicians, and implemented a regime of massive state censorship — all to avoid simply ending mass migration. (READ MORE: Western Civilization Is Not Just a Data Point)
What yesterday’s electoral returns in Europe show is that none of this has worked. In many instances, it has had the exact opposite effect, nurturing a sense of resentment and hostility to the political establishment amongst the native populations of many European countries. More to the point, the emergent outlines of a hardline anti-immigration popular majority in Europe indicates a rising national consciousness among Europeans, sharpened by the threat from abroad. This newly awakened collective consciousness — a coherent sense of “us” and “them” — is still in its infancy. But it will soon mature, and when it does, it is certain to shape the future of the continent (and perhaps the civilization) in the years to come.
Conservatism — both as a self-conscious intellectual philosophy and a felt, mass political sensibility — is almost always articulated and mobilized in response to threats from without. (As I wrote in the American Mind two years ago, “this is a feature, not a bug, of the Right: A political project that seeks to conserve is often incoherent until the traditions, institutions, and ways of life it defends are under threat.”) So it is in Europe and the rest of the West today.
It remains to be seen whether this most recent bout of elections will change much of anything in European politics; Westerners have voted for less immigration many times before, often to little effect. But Europe’s political elites would be wise to give the people what they are asking for, and soon. They may not be wise enough to know it, but the so-called “far right” in Europe today is their last opportunity to avoid the genuine extremism that will invariably emerge to take its place.
